IPCC report: Why is no one on Mumsnet talking about climate change?

[WillPenn]

Was very surprised to see hardly any talk about climate change on here, following on from the latest IPCC report. Are none of you worried about your kids' future or is everyone just sticking their heads in the sand?

It makes me panic to think what lies ahead for my DC if no one acts. Come on Mumsnet, how about a ground up campaign to try and get the govt. and the nation to tackle this elephant in the room head on?

As a family, we are doing what we can to cut back on energy usage - but we are just four people and I'm feeling pretty hopeless about the whole situation at the moment when nobody else seems to care about the future.

[Talkinpeace]

Kitties
The detail of the science is hard to explain. Not to grasp.

Trouble is a lot of the people trying to do the explaining have never had to deal with anybody who is scientifically illiterate - and in fact can't give a shit so long as they can get to the footie. So they are dire at explaining in a way that makes people understand.

And that is the fault of the explainers not the listeners.

There are people who are fantastic at explaining complicated scientific concepts (I happen to live with one), and the New Scientist recently had an editorial realising that the explaining is at fault not the raw message.

So the way the message is put across has to change so that the unconvinced do not feel insulted, left out or persecuted.

That and scientific illiteracy as a badge of pride among journalists and politicians needs to be stamped on.

[Lazyjaney]

I think the problem with the people doing the explaining is they are increasingly having to justify their views to people who are scientifically literate, and ever since the Climategate furore most of the data can be looked at by anyone, so they are increasingly getting called on their way overblown predictions.

[Talkinpeace]

But Climategate increased the number of people who accepted the reality - because it showed that the scientists were human.

I do not know any scientifically literate people under the age of 60 who do not accept Climate change.
A few older than that do not because they have found the paradigm shift too much hard work.

THere are a few who are well funded to make lots of noise, but they do not appear to trust much of what they are paid to say.

Newspaper journalists are generally scientifically illiterate

[claig]

"The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures -- and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas.

The dam began to crack towards the end of last year when leaked e-mails from one of the temples of global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, suggested that a few sleights of hand were being deployed to hide facts inconvenient to the global warming case. An official investigation into these e-mails is on-going.

himalayan.jpgBut the flood gates really opened after the IPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole

www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2010/01/the_dam_is_cracking.html

From the BBC's Andrew Neil

[Lazyjaney]

"Climategate increased the number of people who accepted the reality"

WTF? You cannot be serious. It ruined its reputation.

As to not knowing any sceptics, I suspect you only hang around with fellow kool aid drinkers.

[claig]

"Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away

Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That's why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science"

www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov/25/monbiot-climate-leak-crisis-response

From George Monbiot, Guardian journalist and green environmentalist etc etc

[claig]

"Yes, the hacked climate emails are damaging. But here’s the one you’d need to see if you wanted to show that manmade global warming is a scam.

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging(1). I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them

www.monbiot.com/2009/11/23/the-knights-carbonic/

From George Monbiot

[BoulevardOfBrokenSleep]

"I do not know any scientifically literate people under the age of 60 who do not accept Climate change."

Yeah, that's true actually. I know 'scientists' who don't believe in evolution , and who don't believe in the holocaust ... but they do all believe in anthropogenic climate change. Presumably it helps that it doesn't clash with any established religion.

[claig]

The Political Science of Global Warming

[claig]

"It may be the last report of its kind: a growing chorus of experts thinks a more frequent, less bally-hooed and more up-to-date assessments would be more useful. It is certainly the first since negotiations for a global treaty reining in carbon emissions collapsed in Copenhagen in 2009; the first since questions were raised about the integrity of the IPCC itself following mistaken claims about the speed of glacier melt in the Himalayas and, most important, the first since evidence became incontrovertible that global surface air temperatures have risen much less quickly in the past 15 years than the IPCC had expected. A lot is riding on its findings, from the public credibility of climate science to the chances of a new global treaty

www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/09/ipcc-climate-change-report

[BoulevardOfBrokenSleep]

Mind you, it's not that positive a statement, because scientific literacy is pretty thin on the ground these days.

I do feel sorry for the earth scientists. Them and the evolutionary biologists. I bet they sit around in the pub muttering "Those fuckers at CERN are sorted, they don't get the Daily Mail claiming it's actually the neighbours' microwave interfering with their detectors and not the Higgs Boson at all "

[claig]

There are so many blogs exposing the scam on the internet, thousands of independent researchers running over the figures with a sliderule, and so many people beginning to ask pertinent questions. It's just a matter of time until the house of cards comes crashing down, they've only got so many figures to stick in the dyke.

There are billions of dollars at stake, they want to set up carbon trading exchanges where they will trade carbon credits. The financial markets stand to earn untold dollars off of it and we read that

'The financial markets are humanity’s only hope in the battle against global warming, the world’s top climate expert declared today"

//www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/ipcc-report-the-financial-markets-are-the-only-hope-in-the-race-to-stop-global-warming-8843573.html

Will they be able to reap the dollar rewards or will the independent bloggers and researchers bring the house of cards down?

[claig]

"Forget CDOs and other inventions of the great credit bubble. That's all old hat. Investment bankers are moving on to an area of securities trading that is potentially even more lucrative, and what's more, even has a social value – saving the planet. Or supposedly so, anyway. I've long had my suspicions about the great carbon trading bubble , and I've had them pretty much confirmed by a brilliant article which has been drawn to my attention by one Mark Schapiro in Harper's magazine."

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jeremywarner/100003851/here-comes-the-next-bubble-carbon-trading/

[BoulevardOfBrokenSleep]

Well, claig, you basically have your own religion about this, and that is of course your right. But there's no point pretending that scientific fact comes into it anywhere along the line.

I loved your argument on Sunday, 22:58:59; "If there was anything to worry about, we'd be worrying, but we're not worrying, so there's clearly nothing to worry about". You'd have been a genuine asset on the Titanic.

[claig]

CONNING
THE CLIMATE
Inside the carbon-trading shell game

"Carbon trading is now the fastest-growing
commodities market on earth. Since 2005, when
major greenhouse-gas polluters among the Kyoto
signatories were issued caps on their emissions
and permitted to buy credits to meet those caps,
there have been more than $300 billion worth
of carbon transactions. Major financial institutions
such as Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and
Citibank now host carbon-trading desks in London;
traders who once speculated on oil and gas
are betting on the most
insidious side effects of
our fossil fuel–based
economy. Over the
next decade, if President
Obama and other
advocates can institute
a cap-and-trade system
in the United States,
the demand for carbon
credits could explode
into a $2 to $3 trillion
market , according to
the market-analysis
fi rm Point Carbon.

citizensclimatelobby.org/files/Conning-the-Climate.pdf

[claig]

"If there was anything to worry about, we'd be worrying, but we're not worrying, so there's clearly nothing to worry about"

I believe in the inherent wisdom of the public to spot a scam and to spot the political spinners who work for the bankers and the carbon trading dealers who want a slice of the pie of the $2 trillion to $3 trillion carbon credit market.

They'll be trading derivatives on that market and making billions and if it goes wrong the public will have to bail them out and some of our ex-politicians will probably have lucrative consultancy roles with them and be bale to buy million pound properties all over the world for their "services to banking". And meanwhile some pensioners will sit in one room and be too frightened to turn their heaters on as their fuel bills spiral.

[claig]

Did you see the look on Al Gore's face when the Republican senator said that Ken Lay of Enron had been to the White House to have discussions with Gore, who was then Vice President, about the cap and trade programme?

It was in the David Icke presentation on the Climate Con that I posted upthread.

[KittiesInsane]

Talkin -- trouble is, explaining the thing was my job for a wee while, and I personally get direly muddled around the whole spectral absorption edges and top-of-atmosphere radiation budget stuff.

So, given that I'm more scientifically literate than I sound, I soothe my soul with the thought that parts of it are quite hard to grasp.

(You aren't living with either RP or BC, are you? If the former, please say hi!)

[Talkinpeace]

:-) Nope
But
trying to explain the science is pointless for most people because its too esoteric.
I know from trying to get tax concepts through to people 'pitching' is all.
Its about making them feel able to do something and do part of something larger - then they take ownership

[BoulevardOfBrokenSleep]

The science really isn't that difficult, surely?

I feel like I'm coming over all Gove here, but I was watching Saint Brian of Cox the other night talking about how folks would be queuing round the block to hear scientific lectures when the Royal Institution started... and haven't times changed?
Nowadays they spend their evenings watching Celebrity Shit On A Stick, and get their science from the Mail's "OMG WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!" department.

I suppose we now pay folks to do science for us, so we no longer die of cholera and smallpox; but maybe that's resulted in a bit of a 'someone else's problem' attitude. And an Us/Them culture.

[Talkinpeace]

Boulevard
the whole of the science - interlocking feedback loops and bayesian probabilities is incredibly complex
but
the gist of spreading carbon (oil/coal) that took millions of years to form in a couple of years compared with running water into a bath faster than it can drain away ... makes sense to a lot of people ....

[dododoing]

I find threads like this so frustrating. My husband is a climate scientist (coupled ocean-atmosphere modelling, now with added extras that weren't in the models he was working on 10 years ago, like ice sheets and the carbon cycle stuff). He does science. He isn't corrupt, part of some nebulous 'they' or anything to do with any privileged elite (if he was, the fact we've just had a £700 car bill would be significantly less of an issue!). His funding comes from government sources, yes, but the science has to justify itself on the data available. Since getting his PhD - so 4 years itself - he has spent 9 years working on this science. I started a physics degree at University, but I have long since given up any hope of following the maths involved in representing the different processes in the climate system. The web of physical interactions is incredibly complex. The basic - greenhouse gas, water vapour feedback, warming cycle - is 2+2=4 territory, but the detailed ramifications of how that plays out in the climate system is very complicated. Claig, if you needed brain surgery, would you expect your brain surgeon to have a reasonable level of expertise and place trust in that expertise? I don't understand why that doesn't translate across to my DH - why can't you trust that he (and people like him) have a level of expertise about this subject that - unless you have spent a similar amount of time researching the topic - you can't hope to achieve?

[claig]

dododoing, I don't think your DH is corrupt or part of the elite. The scientists who work at Climate Change centres etc aren't the elite. The elite aren't scientists, they operate at a political level above political representatives.

I have a degree in applied mathematics, so I know how tough maths is.

'why can't you trust that he (and people like him) have a level of expertise about this subject that - unless you have spent a similar amount of time researching the topic - you can't hope to achieve?'

I don't think I have the scientific knowledge that your DH has on it, but I believe the real genesis of this policy is political. Government funding etc is allocated through political priorities. Agenda 21 is not about science primarily, it is primarily political and world leaders and world political representatives are the ones who make agreements about it that they then implement in their nations.

For the science aspects, I don't claim to have detailed knowledge, but I believe that Dr Piers Corbyn and many other PhD researchers who don't believe in manmade climate change have that knowledge and I do tend to believe them more than I believe the governmental scientists, because I believe that the governmental scientists are funded through political objectives, whether they are aware of them or not.

[Lazyjaney]

Your husband is not the problem, the problem is the people at the IPCC et al spinning these highly sensitive models into scare stories.

The models are demonstrably wrong. In fact all models are wrong, and the more complex the more chance of being wrong, and the more chance of being extremely sensitive to small changes in input data.

A lot of people outside Climate science understand that, and are concerned that Climate Science doesn't seem to want to acknowledge it, especially as time and again they are being shown to err on the speculatively dramatic rather than prosaic reality.

This latest release shows the new game - write a bunch of misleading crap for the media to parrot, and dump the real data out later so the actual less certain conclusions are hidden by the crap.

[claig]

And I listen to the news and keep up with what is happenong e.g. Climategate etc and on the basis of accumulated observation of similar events, exaggerations, obvious propagandistic advertising which appeals to the basest elements, political spin and scientists who refute catastrophic climate change, I draw my conclusions as to whether I have been spun and conned or not.